HDR Light Studio - Sweden Tour 2017

I had the pleasure to spend the 1st week of October visiting existing and potential customers in Sweden. Climaxing in a demonstration of HDR Light Studio at the Cinema 4D User Event organised by our Swedish authorised reseller Creative Tools.

It was an extremely busy week, with many miles being driven on the road between locations, and many miles being driven by my computer mouse, as I provided in depth demonstrations of HDR Light Studio features with 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D and MODO.

Importantly, I also got to hear first-hand a wealth of useful feedback that will feed into our software development in the future. I am very grateful for the time our customers gave us for this input and their hospitality. I return to England with renewed excitement, and am looking forward to putting together fresh training videos covering the techniques I was showing.

It was my first time in Sweden, and I fell in love with the place. I can’t wait to return.

It was also my first visit to Creative Tools Head Office in Halmstad. What a beautiful place to work, a lovely setting by the river Nissan. The offices are huge and bursting with a wide range of impressive 3D printing technology and 3D software. Plus Charlie the office dog, who was the star of the show.

I had the pleasure to watch two impressive speakers at the Cinema 4D event.

Jonas Pilz from Maxon presented the new features in Cinema 4D R19. It was a very entertaining presentation, full of good humour and fun. I was really blown away with the improvements in Cinema 4D R19. The viewport is really impressive with real-time reflections and inter-object reflections too. Perfect for live feedback when lighting using HDRI maps and Area Lights. Perfect for HDR Light Studio. The new PBR (Physically Based Rendering) Material provides a physically accurate approach for more realistic end results too. Goodbye fake specular!

Here is a similar presentation given by Jonas at IBC, it’s well worth watching.

I also had the pleasure to see behind the scenes of how Brickland create their high quality 3D imagery and animations using Cinema 4D with Octane Render (note, not with HDR Light Studio just yet, I’m working on it).

Daniel Tegeland from Brickland provided some interesting examples of creating complex dynamic animations and baking them out as alembic files, that were reloaded into Cinema 4D. These less taxing referenced cache models could then be played back providing fast interactions for materials and lighting.

Do check out the Brickland web site to see some inspiring 3D work.

Thank you to Creative Tools for the great venue and hosting. I felt so at home – with the ‘icing on the cake’ being hugs and chocolates as a thank you for presenting. Does it get any better?